Over 800 people, including a half dozen of the world’s most beautiful women, were at Wednesday’s black-carpet reception at the Museum of Fine Arts for famed photographer
Mario Testino, the subject of a provocative new exhibit at the museum.
Gisele Bundchen, the Brazilian-born supermodel who’s BFF with Testino, made the scene, as did angular
A-list models Karlie Kloss, Constance Jablonski, Bianca Balti, Candice Swanepoel, Edita Vilkeviciute, Alessandra Ambrosio, Erin Wasson, Sigrid Agren, Joan Smalls, and Kiara Kabukuru.
Bundchen, wearing a black Halston dress with a black Tom Ford jacket, exploded onto the carpet, announcing her arrival by hollering “Mario!” Thus summoned, the photographer rushed over and patted Bundchen’s ample belly. (She’s pregnant.)
“I have known Mario since I was 16 years old. He’s a sweetheart,” said Gi, who told museum staff she would not answer any personal questions. “Mario always makes people look sexy. . . . It’s that Latin way of seeing people.”
Sitting cross-legged and clad head-to-toe in black, Testino told the audience, “You’ve got to be you, and that’s a very hard thing to do.”
That’s particularly true, he said, if you don’t look like Bundchen, one of his favorite muses and a woman he described to us simply as “va-va-voom.” (Truer words — or sounds — have never been uttered.)
The celebrity shutterbug said that while editing photos of Tom Brady’s lady, he always scans for problems or imperfections.
“And she has no problems. I’m telling you, it’s perfect,” he said. “Everything, the skin, the hands, the ankles. . . . She is very lucky.”

boston.com

Quote:

Mario Testino Talks Muses and Models (and the ‘New Kate Moss’) at His First US Exhibition
by Tyler McCall
With so many stunning photos featuring famous faces ranging from Gisele Bundchen and husband Tom Brady to Lady Gaga, we had to ask Testino about the subjects of his shoots.
Prominent in the exhibition are two of Testino’s muses, Kate Moss and Gisele Bundchen. Not only are they both stunningly gorgeous–Testino even went so far as to say that Gisele “has no flaws”–but the photographer praised both for their personalities and their work ethic. “I think that you can’t do it any other way,” he said of working with models who have strong personalities, “because then the pictures are nothing. You see, the pictures have to have content, it’s not just a plastic outside, it’s also the inside. So you try to get the two together as much as possible.”

In June 2002 the cover and shoot I worked on with Corinne Day and Gisele was published in British Vogue.

Gisele had never been shot by Corinne before and as the ultimate Amazonian Supermodel, she was very intrigued to see how Corinne would shoot her. In true Corinne Day fashion, she had the idea to strip her down to the bare minimal and show off her natural beauty.

Gisele specifically flew to London to do the shoot and we all gathered at a studio with white walls, minimal furniture, and loads of maxi dresses. The fashion editor was the amazingly talented Kate Phelan ( now Head Creative Consultant for Top Shop) and make-up was by the talented, humorous French make-up artist Max Delorme.

For the cover I pulled Gisele’s hair back to keep it simple and for the pictures inside I just enhanced her natural waves with a little Bumble and Bumble Brilliantine. I occasionally attached some wool charm dropped hair accessories that I’d acquired from the Jessica Ogden show I’d worked on for London fashion week that season.

The images were a completely new direction for Gisele and I distinctly remember the team ( excluding Gisele) being interviewed individually, including myself, after the shoot was published for a daily tabloid newspaper ( that shall remain nameless). They conned us into believing the article was about how great Gisele looked as her natural self in the Vogue shoot instead of the ultimate Glamazonian we were used to seeing her as. However, the article was actually about an image that had been published in an American newspaper around the same time, of Gisele with her then boyfriend Leonardo Di Caprio, complaining about how thin she looked. They twisted our words in the article to suit the topic and said that as typical sick fashion people we seemed to think that she looked great as her natural self when they actually thought she looked ill.

The journalist who interviewed us stupidly left her phone number on my answering machine, and on reading her article I chose to ring her back to tell her how disgusted I was with her type of cheap journalism, which entails twisting peoples words to make them suit their articles just to create unnecessary controversy. I also told her that I spoke on everyones behalf whom she interviewed. I hung up on her before I gave her the chance to speak or think about defending herself.

Anyway, all that aside, i still love these pictures as Gisele and everyone else on the shoot did too and it was great to see Gisele as herself in all her natural glory.